There is an increasingly popular view that the Earth's population growth will outstrip resources essential to food production within the next 30 years and, furthermore, that upwards of 80 percent of this additional population will primarily reside within urban centers. Usable farmland and fresh water supplies are being depleted at an ever-increasing pace. Presently, the United States is the largest producer of food crops in the world. The United States' agricultural industry has created most of the innovations responsible for today's modern farming practices. But, this has come at a cost, with innovation-driven farm practices responsible for many of the most pressing issues surrounding food safety and production sustainability. Today, a vast majority of foods are produced that are over-processed, loaded with harmful chemicals, and virtually devoid of nutritional value and taste. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that efforts are now heavily redirected away from the present deleterious farming practices which predominantly take place outdoors away from our cities.
Indoor farming within city boundaries—and, more particularly, indoor vertical farming—is not new. However, its growth has been stymied and it has failed to gain the traction necessary for mainstream appeal and acceptance. Despite the growing desire for organic foods and the popularity of hydroponic growth of food plants, most manifestations of indoor vertical farming have been relatively small, spotty individual efforts, such as, for example, greenhouses on rooftops or perhaps spread across a few acres of ground, or crude setups in relatively small warehouses. These limited efforts are at least partly due to underdeveloped strategies resulting from narrowly-focused thinking.
At the same time, it is well known that many cities have excessive inventories of inactive commercial and residential buildings (e.g. office buildings, warehouse complexes, apartment complexes, strip malls, old hotels and the like) and it would be highly desirable to see them revitalized into useful establishments. It would seem that the development of technologies that would enable these buildings to support growth of a wide variety of farm produce would provide substantial economic benefits in the form of jobs that cannot be exported or outsourced, and sustainability benefits in terms of enhanced food security and safety.
Many hydroponic growing systems have been developed outdoors within greenhouses or similar structures. In fact, it is likely that at least some individuals have successfully attempted to create indoor plant growth systems that function indoors where they are not vulnerable to insects and vermin, adverse weather conditions, and utilize artificial lighting so that they are not reliant on natural lighting from Mother Nature. However, a major obstacle remains when it comes to the challenge of economically beneficial conversion of such excessive indoor spaces for creating indoor vertical farming. That is, until now, there has been a lack of adequate equipment having the necessary characteristics, such as high load-bearing capability (enabling growth of heavier vegetables, potatoes, etc.), highly-efficient use of space, and a flexible design lending itself to scalability, which would greatly facilitate implementation of plant growing modules that could be easily transported from location to location along a support surface (e.g. an underlying floor), combinable to form optimized plant growing systems, and easily disassembled and reconfigured, or transformed, for maximizing efficient implementation across myriad varying application-specific pre-existing indoor space configurations.
Accordingly, there remains a need in the farming science and industry arts for an innovation that would overcome the aforementioned deficiencies and problems that remain unsolved—and thereby retard the implementation of indoor vertical farming—while also serving to revitalize abandoned and/or inactive commercial and residential buildings, and simultaneously creating jobs.